Latest / The Voyage Cast: Real Talk on Marriage, Mental Health, & Emotional Growth / How Affairs Start: Why Good People Cheat and How to Protect Your Marriage

Transcript

How Affairs Start: Why Good People Cheat and How to Protect Your Marriage · The Voyage Cast: Real Talk on Marriage, Mental Health, & Emotional Growth

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Voyage Cast.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: I am Eddie, your host as always, and here is what I have been thinking about.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: There's a sentence I hear in my office pretty often.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: I hear it from men, I hear it from women, and unfortunately I hear this sentence often.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: I even hear it from those that are the most committed Christian types, you know, the ones who are sure they were not the kind of person who could do something like this.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: The sentence I hear is, I never thought I would be the one.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I was reading through Proverbs recently, and if you're not a Bible reader, that's fine.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: Just know that this thing reads like a case study for what we are going to talk about today.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: The passage I want to talk about is written by a father who has seen this happen time and time again.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: And he wants he wants to teach his son how to recognize it early.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, please understand and give me some grace with this.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: I am not a theologian, so take some of my reading for what it's worth, okay?
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: But I am a therapist, and when I read Proverbs 7, I thought this is a 3,000-year-old document, and it's the classic setup for the typical affair.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: It is the same thing I see today.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: So who is this episode really for?
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you're married and you tell me right now that this would never be me, this episode is for you.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Stay with me on that, okay?
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, possibly more than anybody else.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: If there is somebody at work or church or in your friend group and it's gotten a little warm, gotten a little chummy, uh, and you keep telling yourself it's nothing, this episode might be actually for you.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're the one on the other side of an affair, you're still trying to figure out how it happened to you.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think this episode would be for you as well.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: One more thing though.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you're the spouse who got cheated on, some of this episode might actually be a little hard to hear.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so I'm not trying to make things worse for you.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: I am trying to illuminate things.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: But please understand that an explanation is not the same thing as an excuse.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm making zero excuses for bad behavior, but it is useful to understand how these things play out.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: So let me set the scene, okay?
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's dusk.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: A father is standing at the window of his house looking down at the street, and there's a young man walking.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: The father knows the corner he's coming upon, and he knows the house just past it.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: The woman who lives there is another man's wife, and her husband, well, he's out of town on a long trip.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: And the young man does not slow down.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost dark, and before he even gets to the corner, she's out in the street coming to meet him.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm going to tell this the way the text tells it, the way Proverbs tells it.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: The man with a man walking to a woman waiting, but you can flip that around.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: You can obviously see this goes both ways.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: A wife can be the one walking down the street, and the guy is the one stepping out to meet her.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: And he knows exactly what to say to get her, you know, through the front doors, let's say.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: So it works both ways.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so wherever you are in this, just put yourself in the story if you can relate.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: So now getting back to the text of Proverbs, the young man is called simple.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that word doesn't mean stupid.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: It means open, kind of unformed, unfinished.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: He hasn't settled what he's committed to.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: So there's nothing in him that turns him around when he finds himself on the street.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: And notice, nobody's got a gun to his head, nobody's forcing him.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: You can't blame your hormones and your testosterone or your whatever.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he chose this.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the part I think people often miss.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think she knows him.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: The chapter doesn't exactly say it uh outright, but I think the context clues are there.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he's on the road to her house.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: So he knows where she lives.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: And when she meets him, she says, I came out looking for you.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: You specifically.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that is typical of what I see.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Affairs happen between people who already have a reason to be around each other.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: A coworker, a friend of the family, a neighbor, somebody from a church.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't really matter who it is or where it is.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's usually just not a stranger.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: There is occasions where that happens, but that's for a different episode, let's say.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the research does back me up here, though.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: There was a psychologist named Shirley Glass who studied infidelity for more than 25 years.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, she wrote a book called Not Just Friends, Rebuilding Trust and Recovering Your Sanity After Infidelity.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: And she looked at the unfaithful partners she had treated in her own practice.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: A couple hundred people, and 82% of them had the affair with somebody who started out as a friend.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: For men, more than half met that other person at their place of business, at their work, at their job.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: So this is how it usually starts.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: It starts as a friendship.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so what happens next though happens fast.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: She meets him in the street, she grabs him, back to Proverbs, she grabs him and she kisses him before she says a word.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then she says four important things.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: So pay attention to this.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: I came out to find you, you're the one I wanted.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Second, she tells him she made her offering and paid her vows that day.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: So there's this like religious cover on the whole evening.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Basically a way to satiate whatever moral dissonance or cognitive dissonance she's experiencing, or maybe he's experiencing to reassure him.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: Third, she describes the bed, the linen, the perfume, all of it.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: And fourth, my husband's gone.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: He took a bag of money, and he won't be back until the full moon.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: So they got some time.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: So think about what this young man just got.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: He's chosen, his conscience is, let's say, religiously cleared, and especially back then that would be a big deal.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Pleasure is waiting him.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: And nobody's gonna know.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's an affair, that's how an affair works today.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same stuff.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the order of that kind of matters, right?
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the kiss comes before the speech.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: So by the time she's giving him reasons, his body is already ready to go.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: The reasons don't have to be great reasons, by the way.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: They just have to be good enough, convincing enough, let's say, especially with the idea of not being caught.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where the mind kind of is a crazy place, right?
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because seduction changes how your brain actually is working.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, there was a study in uh 2006 by Dan Arielli, I'm not sure I'm saying that right, and George Lowenstein.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, they took a group of college guys at Berkeley and asked them the same question about sex on different days.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Once they were calm and once when they were turned on or aroused.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: And when they were aroused, the same guys were a lot more willing to do things like tell women they loved her, when they didn't, push a date to drink or skip protection.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: The same person, different answers.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: The calm version of a guy had no idea necessarily what the aroused version would be willing to agree to.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of concessions he might make in those compromising positions?
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Lowenstein calls it the hot, cold empathy gap.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: When you're calm, you can't feel what you're going to want when you're not calm.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um so when somebody tells me I would never do that, I believe them, kind of.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: The calm version of them is the one answering, the convicted version, let's say.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: And those researchers said something I think is really important.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Willpower doesn't do much once you're in that state of mind, once you're in that aroused state of mind.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what works is staying out of the situation.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, that's the best.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now there's another element here: secrecy.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: A psychologist named Daniel Wagner studied secret relationships back in the 90s.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: And what he found is that keeping a secret makes the attraction so much stronger.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: People keep obsessing about the relationships they had, um, or the ones they hide, rather.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so when she says, My husband's gone and nobody will know, she's actually lowering the risk tolerance and turning up the attraction all at once.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's the infatuation, of course.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Helen Fisher and her colleagues put people who were newly and intensely in love into a brain scanner.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: And what lit up was the reward system of the brain, the dopamine system, right?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: The part of the brain that produces wanting or that longing or desire.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that works the same way when the person you're infatuated with is not your spouse.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: Proverbs describes all of this uh by liking humans in some sense to animals.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: It says he follows her all at once, like an ox going to a slaughter, like a bird flying into a net.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: Those animals can't see what's in front of them.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: They don't see what's coming, and neither can he, because of that intense arousal, let's say.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: So what's the cost?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: The chapter says he doesn't know it's going to cost him his life.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now back then, that could be literal, okay?
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh today I think it's your life as you know it, your reputation, your money, your years.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd put your family at the top of that list, your marriage, your kids trust in you.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: They may reject you outright.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh sometimes opportunities uh close once people know.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're in a particular community, especially maybe a more religious community, and you're having affairs and you have all these opportunities coming up, those might suddenly disappear, which makes sense because they want to know that they can trust that you have the ability to manage yourself.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um the morning after.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: I've noticed this with my clients in their descriptions to me.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's sort of a sobering that happens after the act.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it's a confusing moment, right?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's when a man or woman, depending on the situation, comes to the question in their mind.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: They may not say it out loud, but what have I done?
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the confusion is about two major things.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: One is about the other person.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: They are gonna be confused about this person they were just with because now they might start having feelings for them.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, the regret comes, but it's a confusing regret because maybe they're interested.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they have real feelings, and then they might still have real feelings about their spouse that they're cheating on.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then they have this other problem of their identity.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, who am I now?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: I never thought I would be the one.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: In chapter five, there's a man at the end of all of this groaning, asking how he could have hated correction and ignored the people who tried to teach him, ironically, like I'm doing now, to whoever's listening to this.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I hope whoever's listening to this is taking all of this to heart.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and there's an old idea in psychology that explains what the mind does next.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's called cognitive dissonance.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: You might have heard it.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we're in a pretty psychologically literate society at this point.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it comes from Leon Festinger back in 1957.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: The short version is that you can't hold two things that contradict each other for very long.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a faithful husband, and yet I did this.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: You can't stand on both those things.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so your mind is going to change one of them, either in the imaginary, or that's where sometimes you'll see like gaslighting coming in, something like that.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so you can own what you did, or you can change the story.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I was never happy, anyways.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the marriage was always going to be over, anyways.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and those days, right after uh the event, the act, are when the person picks kind of one of those two stories or starts to develop those stories in their head.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that's a very difficult story to sort of undo, especially if for whatever reason you still want to be married to the original partner.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you really have to start grieving the loss weirdly of the person you were unfaithful with.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Here's another thought about all of this.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I've heard from a lot of people push back on me in some ways and say, like, I I'm that's not me.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, that can never happen to me.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Listen, I hope so.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: But I take a different approach.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think everybody's at risk.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: We are all the same in this.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the person who denies that could easily be at, I think, higher risk because they're not guarded.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: They're not paying attention.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: And there's even research on this too.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Lorraine Nordgren and his colleagues uh ran four experiments in 2009 and called what they found restraint bias.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: People tend to overestimate their own self-control.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the people who were the most confident in their self-control put themselves around more temptation and they gave in more often.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: His advice was pretty much stay out of the situation, which seems to track, right?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: And keep a humble view of your own willpower.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: And Shirley Glass, the infidelity researcher I mentioned earlier, said kind of the same thing about the people in her office.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of them were naive.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: They thought loving their spouse made them immune.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that belief is what kept them from seeing the warning signs.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: So the father in Proverbs knew this.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: He says, She brought down many, and strong men are on that list.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: And he's telling this to his own son, which means he assumes his own son could be the guy in the street.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Paul does the same thing in the in 1 Corinthians chapter 10.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: He's writing to committed believers, people who were confident in where they stood spiritually, and he walks them back through Israel in the wilderness.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: They had every spiritual advantage, and most of them fell away.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: And fell away even to sexual immorality affairs, things like that.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then he says, Therefore, let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's why Proverbs spends so much time on adultery.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: If you read it, it's littered with it.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: It keeps coming round and round and round again, especially in the beginning.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's reminding you in some real sense that you could be the one.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: So be thoughtful about this.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, what do you do with this?
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: What do you do with all this?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think wisdom is assuming you're capable of being this person and deciding what you're going to do while you're still calm and in your right mind.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's the only time you can decide.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: Proverb gets pretty concrete about it gets pretty concrete about it.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Stay far from her.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: Don't go near the door of her house.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: And think about what that means today.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: He had to walk to her street.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: We carry that street around in our pocket today in our phones, right?
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: So staying far from the door now means the messages you're answering, the conversations on your phone, all that kind of stuff.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a little trickier today, but you have to stay away.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: Do not entertain it thinking that you're not going to be the one.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, so I gotta wrap this up and I'm gonna leave you with this.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: The father's last instruction is plain.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: Do not let your heart turn toward that road and don't wander onto it.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: You could be the one, and there is no room left for naivety.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: Decide how you will be.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, that's it for today.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you find this information useful.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'll put in the link that in the show notes uh the original article that this episode is based on.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: In there you'll find all the resources, passages, references, all that stuff.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and if you think somebody needs to hear this episode, which probably they do, I mean you could throw a rock in a crowd and find somebody who's probably had an affair or having one.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so probably a lot of people need to know this information.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure that you actually like and subscribe, give five-star ratings, all that kind of stuff, because remember the algorithm overlords need that so they can spread the news and spread the word.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: All right, otherwise these messages just go into the ether.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: So tell people, spread it, get it out there.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: All right, thank you so much for tuning in for this episode.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see you next time.